Did you know? 2/6/24

…that siblings can be traumatized by an abortion?

It can be more than just “survivor’s guilt.” My own son asked if maybe he’d never have been born, had I not had my abortion years earlier. It tore me apart.

He asked this when he was a tween, some 20+ years after my abortion. I told him, “You are here because God knew you and planned your life, long before you were born. No matter what came before, you’d still have been born, perhaps years earlier, but you were in God’s heart all along. Whether I had the abortion or not.”

Lumina is offering a Siblings weekend retreat. April 5-7, 2024. Doylestown, PA. Be there, aloha.

…that Martin Luther King, Jr’s niece regrets her abortions?

… who Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster was?

And that the body of this Black American Benedictine foundress is thought to be incorrupt? And that she may be the “first African American woman to be found incorrupt”? “According to Catholic tradition, incorruptible saints give witness to the truth of the resurrection of the body and the life that is to come.”

…and that the patroness of the post-abortive is also known as “The Black Madonna?”

Our Lady of Częstochowa is depicted in a painting legend says was painted by St. Luke himself. Whether true or not, it is true that the face and hands of Our Lady have blackened after centuries of being exposed to candle smoke and the icon is loved and revered by not just Poles as “The Black Madonna.” The image’s face and neck also bear scars from swords and arrows of Poland’s various enemies trying to destroy the painting. Those scars were painted over or removed repeatedly, but kept strangely coming back, just as before, until finally the scars were left and accepted as Our Lady’s reminders that we too are all scarred. As Theresa Bonopartis of Lumina relates, “like the scars on her face, though the wounds of abortion are forever a part of you, they can be healed.”